Claire Booth and Anna Tilbrook – The Infinite Shining Heavens

Claire Booth – soprano
Anna Tilbrook – piano
The Infinite Shining Heavens

Oliver Knussen – The Learn’d Astronomer
Franz Schubert – Die Sterne
Robert Schumann – Mondnacht
Johanna Muller Hermann – Wie eine vollmondnacht
Alban Berg – Nacht
Clara Schumann – Mein Stern
Modest Mussorgsky – Noch (Night)
Sergei Rachmaninov – V molchani nochi taynoy (In the Silence of the Secret Night)
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov – In the dark the Nightingale is Silent
Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky – gentle stars shone for us
Gabriel Fauré – Clair de lune
Claude Debussy – Nuit d’etoiles
Rita Strohl – Roses dans la nuit
Claude Debussy – Clair de Lune
Thea Musgrave – The Man in the Moon
Elizabeth Maconchy – Sun, Moon and Stars
Benjamin Britten – At the mid hour of the night
Muriel Herbert – How beautiful is night
Ralph Vaughan Williams – The Infinite Shining Heavens

Claire Booth and Anna Tilbrook return with a celestial-inspired programme, The Infinite Shining Heavens, exploring humanity’s enduring fascination with the night sky. Embracing wonder, solitude and transcendence, the recital opens with the astronomer himself in Oliver Knussen’s reimagining of Walt Whitman’s The Learn’d Astronomer. Journeying through German, Russian, French and English song traditions, it pairs the shimmer of Fauré’s Clair de lune with its German counterpart in Schumann’s Mondnacht, culminating in Vaughan Williams’ visionary The Infinite Shining Heavens, where private emotion meets cosmic vastness.